


Always Falling, Never Stopping

by Sholio



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Disaster Avocados, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 01:39:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17736605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Karen in the aftermath of Punisher 2x11.





	Always Falling, Never Stopping

Karen walks fast and walks tall, and she doesn't look back ( _except the once_ ). The pavement is sharp and gritty under her bare feet, the hospital's courtyard and drive filled with panicked patients clinging to oxygen masks and IVs, and nurses trying to keep them calm. She'll probably feel guilty for this later, as she passes gurneys with intubated patients and surgeons still peeling off blood-stained gloves. Later. There's no room in her heart or head right now for _later_ , no room for anything but _now_.

She hails a cab and sinks against the seat and finally breathes. She doesn't mean to look back, she really doesn't -- but she does anyway, and she sees no one she knows. 

Her phone vibrates when she's halfway uptown with a text from Foggy. _Tell me you're not at Sacred Saints Hospital right now._

Her fingers feel heavy and clumsy, her brain even more so; she's still deciding whether to text back when another comes in: _Karen? Don't worry me here._

She has a feeling he's just going to keep texting until he gets an answer, and that's only if he doesn't call out the cavalry, namely Matt. So she texts back, simply: _No. I'm not._

_OH THANK GOD,_ Foggy's return text declares, and then, _Have you seen the news?_

She just says, _Yes._ And then she starts to wonder what part of it he's talking about, exactly. The cab's radio is tuned to a channel that's playing Spanish-language pop music. Karen checks the _Bulletin_ 's Twitter feed, which is how she finds about about the car chase on the freeway, and she's so thoroughly glued to it that she comes back slowly to the cabbie saying, "Ma'am? This your stop?" She doesn't think it's the first time he's said it.

She pays him and gets out and stands in the alcove to the door leading up to their office, with her bare feet leeching heat into the sidewalk and passing customers for Nelson's Meats giving her strange looks. She stands there staring at her phone -- at the jabber on the social media feeds, at the shaky news-chopper footage -- until suddenly the door opens, bumping her elbow, and Foggy comes out and gives her a look, a very careful look. 

"Karen," he says at last, in an oddly gentle voice, "did you know your feet are bleeding?"

"Oh," she says, and looks down. There must have been glass. Hopefully nothing worse than glass. New York sidewalks and taxi floors aren't great places to go barefoot.

Foggy takes her arm ever so gently and takes her inside, and through a storage room door she didn't even know about into the back of Nelson's Meats, and from there into a bathroom with a shower that has a hose attachment on it. He closes the door and looks pointedly at Karen. After a dazed minute, she sits on the closed toilet lid. She still has her phone in her hand but she's no longer looking at the screen.

The bathroom, like the entire butcher shop, smells vaguely of blood, that stale copper smell, even though everything in here is scrupulously clean. When you get enough blood in a place, the smell probably never comes out. She wishes she didn't know quite as intimately as she does what blood smells like.

Foggy fiddles with the knobs on the shower and sprays the nozzle over his hand until it turns warm. "You'll notice," he says as he crouches down by her feet, "that I'm not asking why you're not wearing shoes."

"Foggy," she says, half-laughing, "you don't have to wash my feet, Foggy, come on." She tries to curl her toes away, but Foggy holds onto her foot doggedly, turning it up to the light.

"You actually have some glass in here," he says in disgust, picking it out with his fingers. She hadn't realized her feet were so cold; his hands feel hot. "You know, you could get blood poisoning or something."

"I'm not going to die from walking around barefoot, even in New York. I used to go barefoot all the time when I was a kid ... Foggy ..."

His head is bowed so she can't see his face, and he's very carefully cleaning the dirty sole of her foot with his thumb and small directed bursts from the nozzle's spray head, getting his pants damp with backwash. "You need to disinfect these. There's a first-aid kit under the sink. Can you lean over and reach it for me?"

"Foggy," she sighs, and rests her hand on top of his head for a minute before she leans over and gets the kit.

There's a brisk knock on the door of the bathroom, and Foggy's brother's voice says, "Hey, everything okay in there? Guys?"

"Fine!" Foggy hollers back, caught with one hand on Karen's foot and the other holding a tube of ointment. "Go away!"

"Yeah, so," Theo says, "your friend is here, can he come in?"

Foggy looks up at Karen and raises his eyebrows, and she says, "Sure," so then Matt is crowding into the bathroom and closing the door behind him, while Theo wanders off muttering something about _Not even gonna ask._

There's barely enough room for two people; there _really_ isn't enough room for three.

"Hi," Matt says, looking a little sheepish about it, and then he adds cautiously, "Karen, are you bleeding?"

She'd like to ask how he can tell over the smell of blood that's everywhere here, but she thinks the answer is probably _Because Matt._ (And she wonders suddenly, for the first time, if working over the butcher shop is hard for him; if the smell of blood bothers him as much as it does her, except he can smell it everywhere.)

"I'm okay," Karen says, and from Foggy: "Could use another hand here."

Matt crouches down, careful not to knock Foggy over in the close confines of the bathroom, and finds her ankle with a brush of his fingers and then Foggy closes a hand over Matt's and shows him how to hold it, and Matt holds her foot (fingers warm and steady on her ankle) so Foggy can use both hands to tweeze out the glass and disinfect the cuts.

And Karen just tilts her head back against the wall and lets them, in this stupid too-small bathroom behind a butcher shop, with the fire alarm still a faint hum of memory in her ears, her skin a map of every place Frank's hands touched her and she touched him, and the taste of blood on the back of her tongue.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Always Falling, Never Stopping [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18171386) by [blackglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackglass/pseuds/blackglass)




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